I’ve been using Cygwin on my Windows partition to run a particular job every minute. Cron (Vixie’s cron) works perfectly, except that messages like this one were appearing (every minute!) in my Windows event log: …read the rest →

It’s funny. I’ve recently been told—by more than one person—that Sara and I are “brave” for planning to deliver our baby at home. This from people who are educated, intelligent and have my respect. And yet, they couldn’t have picked a worse way to characterize the decision. What’s going on here?

Read on, and then you tell me: isn’t it actually more courageous for a low risk mother-to-be to voluntarily walk into a hospital to give birth?…read the rest →

After a few more hours of kayaking this morning (had some great wildlife sightings), we headed to Khao Lak for the final leg of our trip. We’re now at a 5-star resort just north of town, on a sparsely populated tract of white-sand beach. The contrast from last night is stark–we no longer need a flashlight to get to the bathroom. And instead of last night’s rudimentary, cold-water shower, we’ve got a teak-and-slate-appointed bathroom with a 2-person tub and 2 shower heads.

Besides kayaking, we’ve been doing some trekking here. Today’s hike was through a deep limestone cave, through which two different streams run. Thousands of bats, dozens of cave crickets, several large spiders, a few cave toads, and water deeper than our heads. At some points, I had to swim with one hand, trying to keep my other hand above the water (in that hand were: my [non-waterproof] flashlight, and our drybag, which held our [non-waterproof] camera.)